It has been reported that over 3.5 million claims for missing luggage were filed with major United States airlines in 2005 alone. Though this number is relatively small as a percentage when the total number of passengers in the U.S. is considered, the cost to the airline industry has been estimated to be approximately $1.6 billion, due to payments made for items that are never reunited with owners and the efforts made to find and return misrouted items to their rightful owners.
Misrouted luggage creates problems beyond the monetary cost to an airline. Lost luggage may represent the loss of business materials for a business traveler who needs the materials for a meeting at his/her destination. For recreational travelers, this can mean disappointing vacations or lost gifts and souvenirs. Regardless of apologies and acceptance of blame, an airline simply cannot turn the clock back so that a vacationer has their camera during the vacation, so vacation pictures that were in the lost luggage are not gone forever, and so that the business traveler can still make a positive ‘first impression.’ In 2005, one major airline lost/misrouted approximately 1% of all passenger checked items. There is no better way for a business to lose customers than to provide inadequate service, particularly when that service is far below competitors. In other words, losing and misrouting of items generates considerable ill will for the air carrier, and the industry in general, damaging the carrier's reputation and making it difficult to retain existing customers or gain new passengers.
Another major issue with misrouted or lost items relates to the United States federal government directive on Positive Passenger Bag Match (PPBM), part of the 2001 Aviation and Transportation Security Act. In short, the directive requires that any checked item on an airline must be matched with a passenger that actually boards the plane. In recent past, Southwest Airlines (SWA) handed out generic plastic numbered boarding cards to people in the order that they arrived at the gate. However, when a particular number failed to board the plane, airline personnel would have to identify the number missing, match that number to a passenger, identify if any bags were checked, and remove those bags from the plane's cargo holds. This required SWA to modify their check-in procedures. For every airline, items that are stowed and need to be removed causes logistical problems in finding the bag, and then removing it. On average, delays have been reported as being approximately 7 minutes, a considerable delay in light of the volume of planes that are being sent in a given day from a single terminal at a major airport.
The PPBM, however, is overall a benefit to lives and to the industry in battling potential terrorist attacks. El Al airlines reported identifying a piece of luggage having an explosive device where the explosives were approximately the thickness of a sheet of wax paper. Had the device exploded with the plane in mid-flight, numerous lives would have been lost. The financial impact would have included the cost of the plane, with a new Boeing 747-400 series plane costing approximately $211 million, and the litigation costs and insurance costs for all the passengers.
The U.S. domestic airline industry has seen significant financial pressures even as passenger bookings have increased geometrically. Numerous airlines are in or have recently been in bankruptcy reorganization. The airlines have attempted to reduce costs in a number of manners, including staff reductions and increased efficiency through various procedures, including boarding. Staff reductions may be one of the causes of misrouted items, and misrouted items decrease airline efficiency. Building in overhead expenses for dealing with misrouted items after the fact, which for one major airline alone has been estimated at $100 million, is difficult for airlines that are losing money.
Airlines have responded to these problems in a number of manners. One approach has been not to treat the disease by preventing lost luggage, instead to treat the symptom by lessening the cost of reuniting customers with lost items. For instance, the World Tracer System has a computer-based customer service application that allows persons to log-in through the internet and input lost item information so that the bag can be located and retrieved. However, this requires people to retain and utilize the claim stubs provided when they checked their baggage, and requires people who may be far from home finding an internet access point. Furthermore, this does little to alleviate the burden of costs for airline personnel physically locating the items, rerouting the items to the proper destination, and then delivering the items by land vehicle.
Some approaches do attempt to treat the disease by working to reduce the incidence of misrouted items. While airlines once simply placed numbered tags on an item, the established industry standard for tracking luggage has evolved into the use of bar-coded paper/adhesive tags. Upon presenting bags for checking, a computer terminal connected with the airline's database used by the airline's check-in agent prints out a specified number of the tags in long strips. The agent removes a backing from a pressure-sensitive adhesive portion of the tag, and secures the tag to the item, typically by making a loop through a handle provided on the item. The bar code is unique to that item, and the tag includes the passenger name and destination airport code. The portion removed from the tag is provided to the customer as a claim stub. Between the agent and the plane's cargo hold or bay, the item is sorted and handled by a number of personnel and numerous conveyor belts.
The tag is scanned at various points between the agent and the plane's hold. Many of these scans are automated. That is, a bag may pass along a conveyor belt at high speed and a fixed scanner will read the tag as the item passes. The information received by the scanner is utilized to control chutes and turns along the conveyors so that a single agent's station can deliver checked items to dozens of gates at several terminals distributed around an airport. As one can imagine, such a system is expensive to build, operate, and maintain.
Despite the presence of this system, the above-discussed problems still arise. Should scanners fail to recognize the presence of an item, it will likely arrive at an incorrect destination. Should the scanner improperly read a tag, the item will again arrive at an incorrect destination. As the tag is passive, the system relies entirely on the scanners. However, damage to the paper tag causes faulty reading. Additionally, should the printer that made the tag malfunction, such as printing too slowly, the bars may be widened resulting in an erroneous reading. Similar problems are encountered in scanning and reading devices that attempt to optically recognize characters. If the tags are not visible to the scanner, such as being underneath the bag or folded over themselves, the tags are of no use to the scanner. Dirt or smudges on the bar code can also hamper or prevent proper reading of the tag. As a result of these factors, the read accuracy of the tags is only approximately to 80% to 90%.
Once the bag is at the gate, a scanner is typically used to read the tag as the item enters the plane, principally to satisfy the federal PPBM. The scanner is either mounted on the conveyor belt leading to the cargo hold or is manually operated by a baggage handler. This is time consuming and, as baggage handlers are understaffed and time-constrained, prone to error.
As noted above, these tags are passive, meaning that they do not actively communicate and report to any other system, instead simply being read by the scanners. This requires the scanners to be placed everywhere the bag is supposed to travel, which produces a static snap shot of where the bag is when it passes a scanner. For predictable yet undesirable events, such as a bag falling off a conveyor, being erroneously removed and placed on an incorrect tug tractor by a baggage handler, or arriving at an incorrect gate because the scanners failed to recognize the bag, the tag has no way to alert the system of the undesirable event. The system, thus, relies on correct operation at virtually every turn. Once a bag is lost, there is no mechanism to re-direct the bag until the passenger lands at their destination and complains, or an overworked baggage handler notices the error at a connection airport.
Attempts to address the problems with the passive bar-coded tags, which have to have a line of sight with a scanner, have principally revolved around the use of disposable Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags which include an embedded microchip in the form of an integrated circuit and an antenna. There are generally three types of RFID tags, though only one type is used in airports. The first type includes a power source so that the RFID can actively broadcast the information encoded therein. However, these are comparatively elaborate and expensive. The second type includes a small battery used only for powering the antenna for receiving a signal. This also tends to be expensive, and also has a short range. The third, which is the least expensive and is the type used in airport baggage tracking, utilizes an antenna that receives inductive power from a transceiver. As this type of RFID tag passes by the transceiver, the inductive power charges the antenna and the IC chip so that the antenna then transmits the information encoded therein. When ordered in bulk, the cost of these RFID tags currently may be as low as $0.07, though a better estimate is probably approximately $0.24. In any event, the cost is relatively low when considered as a portion of the overall fare paid by an airline traveler. Still, these RFID tags can only communicate over a short distance. The tags have difficulty transmitting through materials so that, should the tag be below the item on the conveyor belt, it may not receive or transmit a signal. While use of these RFIDs can improve read accuracy to over 90% under proper conditions, they are still passive devices. Therefore, they do not help monitor the bags once they have passed from the conveyor systems, such as on a tug tractor for delivery to the plane unless additional transceivers are placed near the airplanes to scan bags as they enter the plane.
The RFID transceivers are entirely different from the bar code readers, resulting in a significant infrastructure capital expenditure on the part of the airports or partnering airlines. New computer terminals and printers are needed at check-in to print the RFID tag within a paper tag that is attached to a checked item. Each RFID must be a unique tag as it is statically preprogrammed, and a passenger is assigned to the RFID. The preprogrammed tags are not reusable so that, over time, costs will be significant. While EEPROM-equipped RFIDs are available, locating these in a paper tag would severely impair long-term survivability for the device, and the labor required to reprogram the RFID would not be justified in comparison to using the cheapest type, discussed above.
The preprogrammed RFID transmits its identifier to the transceiver. As noted, the RFID is assigned to a passenger, but does not carry that information as it is preprogrammed. Accordingly, the transceiver must then broadcast to or communicate with a central database to retrieve information about the bag's destination, and must do so quickly. Therefore, an electronic network is needed for communicating with a central server. While these systems have not extensively been installed, a Wi-Fi network is generally utilized for this data transmission, which may also include tracking and logging where an item has traveled.
The central database system requires new staff requirements of highly skilled personnel, e.g. database administrators and software programmers, who are generally highly compensated. If the software is maintained by the vendor, the airport may incur licensing costs in addition to the capital expenditures.
While RFID technology holds certain promises, its use has not fulfilled those promises. To date, no airport has successfully implemented an RFID solution. A $125 million Oracle-Delta Airlines project has been cancelled. Several airports, such as Hong Kong international airport (HKG), have started projects; however, these are major implementation projects running over multiple years in order to upgrade the entire airport.
An RFID system purportedly usable for airline baggage is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,842,121. In contrast to the RFID discussed above, the RFID is encoded with a proper destination before being located on the item. Encoding requires programming the IC chip at the check-in station, which requires additional equipment and is a low-speed process in comparison with having this done during high-speed manufacturing. A transceiver or interrogator is used in the same manner as the bar-code scanners. In any event, these RFIDs are still passive devices.
It should be noted that the RFID devices including a power source have been utilized in a system referred to as a Real Time Locating System (RTLS). This allows communication ranging from 50 to 1000 feet. However, as discussed above, programming of the tag at the check-in is required, and reprogramming of the microchip for reuse is still required, which require connecting the device to hardware and, thus, are labor and time consumptive.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,975,222 describes an asset tracking apparatus utilizing Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to identify and track an item which may be used with checked baggage. The system utilizes, for instance, a personal data assistant-type device equipped with the GPS hardware and an active transceiver. However, other than disclosing a “monitoring station,” there is no discussion of how to implement such a system throughout an airport for use by airline personnel, integration between multiple airports, or for effective use by a single passenger for their own travel.
Accordingly, there has been a need for an improved system, method, and device for tracking and routing of airline baggage.